“Indeed,” Professor Reese answered.
“Huh,” I said. I walked back over to the light switch and turned the lights off and then back on. Professor Reese looked over and smiled at me. I smiled back.
Before a week ago, I’d barely ever been in a science lab, and now I was in them all the time. But it was more than that. There was this secret layer of science that had always been there, when I made hot chocolate in Dad’s microwave or turned on the lights. The secret layer of science was everywhere. I’d just never noticed it before.
Before Professor Reese.
I didn’t always understand what she was talking about, but I liked it. Even the parts I didn’t understand.
“I need to pick up something in the Life Science Hall,” Professor Reese said. “Someone, actually.” She turned to TJ. “And I think this will interest you in particular.” She led us into the lobby and up the main stairs.
The Life Science Hall had a model of an ear so big you could crawl down the canal. There were displays on how muscles moved and how your brain worked. But Professor Reese walked straight back to where the animals were: two kinds of slithery snakes, a red-kneed tarantula creeping across its tank, slimy bullfrogs squirming on rocks, and stick insects wobble walking along a branch.
TJ hurried ahead, saying, “I love this place!”
But I didn’t, and that was because everything in the glass aquariums was creeping or squirming or slithering. I hung out by the tortoises because they barely moved.
I thought, Me and Megan’s vet/beauty parlor/day care should only be for animals with fur. Anyone with a sick boa constrictor will just have to take it somewhere else.
“You said you had to pick up something?” I asked Professor Reese because, by then, all the creeping and squirming and slithering was making my skin crawl so much, they could have put me in one of the aquariums.
“Indeed.” She walked into a back office and came out holding a clear plastic tank. “Come look,” she called to TJ as she carried it over to me.
There wasn’t any water in the tank. Instead, there was a layer of wood shavings, a curved-over piece of bark the size of a slice of bread, and a fat branch with twigs poking up. Three tiny white dishes held dry dog food, an orange slice, and a soggy sponge. On top of the whole tank was a clear plastic lid with air holes in it. “So, what do you think?” Professor Reese asked.
Me and TJ leaned in to look closer.
All of a sudden, two long skinny brown antennas waved out from underneath the curved bark . . . followed by a hard, shiny brown bug head . . . and then six spiky bug legs sticking out from a bug body . . . and then an abdomen that just kept coming and coming, sliding out in segment after segment of hard, shiny brown bug body.
“This is my Madagascar hissing cockroach,” Professor Reese said. “I asked the museum to order an extra one for me.”
“You paid money for that?” I asked.
But TJ was already saying, “Can I hold it?”
“You may when we get home.” Professor Reese handed him the tank. “And you can carry the tank while we’re on the streetcar.”
So the whole way home, TJ held the tank on his lap, looking down through the lid at the big brown bug with its shiny bug head and its waving bug antennas and its long, gross bug abdomen (full of bug guts—you could just tell) and its six spiky bug legs. By the time we got off the streetcar, TJ was calling it “Spike.”
He helped Professor Reese clear a space on the bookcase, while I cuddled Baxter. “You’re not gross like a bug,” I whispered as I shook my head. He shook his head back.
“TJ, why don’t you go up to the refrigerator and find a snack for Spike,” Professor Reese said. “See what’s in the vegetable drawer.”
So TJ ran upstairs and came back down with a carrot. “I got a long skinny one so he can eat one end and walk up and down on the rest of it.”
Professor Reese took the lid off the tank. When she picked up Spike, he started hissing and kicking out with his gross bug legs until she put him on TJ’s hand.
Spike sat, waving his little bug antennas for a while. TJ just laughed.
Finally, Professor Reese said, “Let’s give him the carrot and then get to work.”
So TJ put Spike into the tank, stuck in the carrot, and put the lid back on while Professor Reese studied the map, and I scritched Baxter’s ribs.
“We need to figure out how Baxter finds the hat when we can’t. He must be using one of his five senses,” Professor Reese said. “He can’t taste or touch the hat until he finds it. And hats don’t make any noise. Sight, perhaps?”
“But once you teleport the hat, he doesn’t see it again until he finds it,” I said.
“Good point.” Professor Reese nodded.
TJ plunked down in the spinny chair. “Maybe the hat smells like us.”
“Like those movies where a bloodhound follows criminals through the woods,” I added. We talked about what criminals always do, which is to run through a stream to wash the scent off their feet (though that doesn’t work so much with TJ).
We decided to try that. We washed the hat in the washing machine (conveniently located in the lab). Then I ran upstairs to get a plastic bag that I could wear like a glove to pick up the hat and stick it in the dryer (also conveniently located in the lab).
After the hat was dry, I used the plastic bag again to put it in the teleporter (conveniently located near the washer and dryer). Then we teleported the hat and followed Baxter to the destination site, where he barely stopped before galloping on. But even though the hat didn’t smell like us anymore, Baxter found it, like
